West Brighton man finds Munchkins, coffee and kindness at local Dunkin' Donuts

Staten Island Advance/Jeff Harrell"Chris" (above) was recently forced outside for the night when the elevator in his building at the West Brighton Houses broke down.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. --- This one’s for the Dunkin’ Donuts’ coffee crew in West Brighton who took a big, burly, grumpy guy in a motorized wheelchair off Forest Avenue in the middle of the night last week.

Chris needed that hug.

The elevator in his building at the West Brighton Houses had broken down for the sixth time in a month. Except this time, Chris was stuck on the ground level looking up at his apartment on the sixth floor.

Chris has no family.

And Hercules wasn’t around to carry his 400 pounds, plus a motor chair that weighs as much as a Volkswagen up six flights of stairs.

Good thing Dunkin’ Donuts is open 24 hours.

“So I was up all night,” Chris says, listing several reasons why he doesn’t want to see his last name in print, none of which involve his problem with the elevator.

But before I get to the nice Dunkin’ Donuts people who served Chris coffee and spared the big guy a night out on the street, rewind back to 11 a.m. last Thursday.

That’s when Chris rolled out of his apartment to the elevator — where a sign read: “elevator broken.”

By 3 p.m., a repairman was finishing up. “He said it’s been fixed,” Chris recalls.

So Chris hopped a ride down six floors and hung out with friends until about 6 p.m. when he headed back to the elevator.

But ... broke again. This time there were people trapped.

An FDNY spokesman confirmed that shortly after 7 p.m. firefighters “removed several people on the elevator.”

Chris stayed grounded amid the emergency rush, wondering when the elevator was going to be fixed.

“I waited, and they came at 11,” Chris says. “They said they can’t fix it tonight. They said, Come back tomorrow.’”

The explanation meant Chris was out in the cold.

So he called 911.

The operator told Chris he did not have a 911 emergency and that he should dial 311.

Chris was in no mood to play phone tag. He hurled a few obscenities in the 911 dispatcher’s ear and hung up.

Then he took off for a late-night cruise in a neighborhood that can have its moments.

“Me, running around here at three or four in the morning, this is a recipe for something bad,” Chris says. “I mean, put two and two together ... a guy in a wheelchair, some people think I’m easy. He stopped first at the Ladder 79 firehouse on Castleton Avenue and chatted up a firefighter who recognized him from the rescue scene.

Then Chris pushed the go button and hit the streets again, this time toward Forest Avenue.

Fed up with the night and busted elevators, Chris was rolling along when he felt his wheelchair slow down.

The battery on his chair was running low.

That’s when he spotted the lights on inside Dunkin’ Donuts at 770 Forest Ave.

A place that, on this night offered more than coffee and munchkins.

It offered a warm spot to settle without being a sitting duck — and an electrical outlet where he could recharge his ride.

“I only had 20 bucks on me,” Chris says. “I bought some coffee. I don’t want to just get in there and sit. They gave me some coffee, too.”

Kenneth, an afternoon shift leader at Dunkin’ Donuts, wasn’t working that night, but he hinted that Chris probably isn’t the first person their late-night crew has hosted with a smile and a cup or two of java on the house.

The Housing Authority maintains a centralized call center 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to log reports and assign crews to respond to any reported problems. There’s also a procedure to accommodate handicapped residents during an elevator breakdown.

“When this happens and we know there are wheelchair-bound or mobility-challenged people out there, we can provide an emergency stair climber for them,” Ms. Stainback says.